Dealing with multiple voices : academic discourse socialization of beginning doctoral researchers using English as an academic lingua franca at a Hong Kong university

Abstract

Academic discourse socialization (ADS) concerns the mediated processes of learners’ socialization into academic discourse of a community (Kobayashi, Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2017). This study focuses on a relatively under-explored form of mediation for ADS, feedback. Since feedback and responses to feedback are interactions of knowledge and expectations between learners and their feedback providers as socializing agents, feedback offers a site for exploring the mediated processes of socialization. This study explores feedback as mediation for beginning doctoral researchers’ ADS processes by addressing two questions: (1) How do beginning doctoral researchers respond to feedback from their socializing agents on their written drafts of research as they are socialized into the academic discourse of their community? (2) Why do they respond to the feedback in such ways? Beginning doctoral researchers’ ADS processes are theorized with Engeström’s (2001) activity theory, which explicates the relationships between feedback and the macro sociocultural, sociohistoric, and institutional context of socialization. In addition, beginning doctoral researchers’ processes of responding to feedback are theorized as interactions and negotiations of voices from themselves and their feedback providers with Bakhtin’s (1981) multiple voices, dialogism, and authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. An ethnographic multiple-case design was adopted to collect data from four ethnic Chinese doctoral researchers in their first two years of study at an English-medium university in Hong Kong. Data collected included the participants’ written drafts of research with feedback, self-reflective journals, observations, and semi-structured interviews. Prior’s (1998) concept of tracing “response-revision connections” was adopted to compare the participants’ developing written drafts with the feedback they received in order to find out how they responded to the feedback. Emerson et al.’s (2011) inductive coding approach was used to analyze the transcripts of the interviews, the audio-recorded observations, and the participants’ journals in order to uncover why they decided to respond to the feedback in certain ways. The analyses revealed that the participants showed three types of responses to feedback: total adherence to feedback, acceptance of feedback with ambivalence, and rejection of feedback. Their responses to feedback were shaped by their active self-positioning and positioning of their feedback providers in relation to the issues of power relations, knowledge and expertise, past academic experience, expectations for feedback practices, and goals for their doctoral studies and their future career. That is, the participants’ feedback-revision processes were sociohistoric and sociopolitical and were characterized by their exercise of agency. The analyses contribute to theorizing learner agency in ADS research, which responds to Duff & Doherty’s (2015) call. Particularly, this study reveals the importance of exploring the relationships between learners’ agentive stances and actions to understand their ADS processes and outcomes. Practically, the analyses suggest that beginning doctoral researchers need to more critically reflect upon their responses to feedback and learn to manage ambivalence or affect. The analyses also suggest that dialogue about the feedback-revision processes between supervisors and supervisees can be encouraged to enhance beginning doctoral researchers’ ADS experience and the supervision relationship.